THE KOCHS NEVER WORE BREAD-BAG GALOSHES OR BOUGHT A SHIRT ON SALE AT KOHL'S

The Wisconsin governor may have helped his presidential ambitions with his speech Saturday....

An anecdote from Walker about shopping at Kohl’s seemed to underscore his budget-cutting ways and his ability to relate to voters.

He noted that he and his wife, Tonette, will celebrate their 23rd wedding anniversary next month. When they were first married, Walker recalled, he bought a sweater at Kohl’s -- for full price. Tonette chided him, saying he could never go back to the store again “until you learn how to shop at Kohl’s.” (Translation: Wait for a sale, use coupons or deals from Kohl’s rewards program.)

Fast forward to a more recent purchase, with Walker joking he had used so many coupons and other discounts and “the next thing you know they are paying me to buy that shirt!”

John Dickerson of CBS News, writing in a column for Slate, summed up the appeal of Walker’s anecdote: “I’m one of you” the governor was saying....

Response on the left to Ernst and the bread bags was snobbish, superior and dumb to the point of embarrassing. First, they couldn’t believe it -- no one wears bread bags on their shoes in a storm, how absurd, she must be developmentally challenged. Then they denigrated what she said, putting pictures on Twitter of themselves wearing bread bags on their feet, accompanied by comments that had all the whiff of the upper class speaking of the quaint ways of the help....

I liked what Ernst said because it was real.

I have no desire to mock either of these people for having to make do with less at various points in their lives. But here's another story I just read, which reminds me that no matter who the public face of the GOP is in the near future, the people running the show are folks who think Kohl's sales and bread-bag galoshes are for losers:

The Koch brothers’ political operation intends to spend $889 million in the run-up to the 2016 elections, according to an attendee at the operation’s annual winter donor gathering in the California desert.

The spending goal, shared with donors at a Monday morning session at the Rancho Mirage Ritz Carlton, reflects the sweeping ambition of a private conservative political network that in many ways has eclipsed the power of the official Republican Party.

4 comments:

Kohl's? How elitist! (Snark.) Most really desperate people cannot afford even Wal-Mart. And these, often hardworking but worn out folks, are so despised by the silk underpants crowd such as the Kochs it makes manifest that we are back in the days of Social Darwinism.

"Well, that's about it. That's what we have and that's what we owe. It isn't very much but Pat and I have the satisfaction that every dime that we've got is honestly ours. I should say this — that Pat doesn't have a mink coat. But she does have a respectable Republican cloth coat. And I always tell her that she'd look good in anything." *